Instead of water, Pluto's climate is driven entirely by nitrogen, which has a freezing point of -210 °C and forms conditions which makes our snowstorms look snuggly.

In the video above, NASA shows that freezing nitrogen forms thick glaciers on Pluto which resemble the icy giants of our own planet.

It ain't even half hot Mum: The frozen mountains surface of Pluto are shown in this picture, a panorama stretching across 780 miles

Alan Howard, a member of the mission’s Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, said he "did not expect" to see such a familar weather system in "the frigid conditions of the outer solar system".

"Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrological cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow, and returns to the seas through glacial flow," he added.

“Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard and no one predicted it.”

Today, NASA released a series of astonishing images showing the super-cold mountains of Pluto, including the one below, which is backlit by the sun.

These mountains of frozen nitrogen have a "strangely Arctic look", according to NASA

"This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

"But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto’s atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains."